A Facebook Pixel Story

March 7, 2018

The morning fog was lifting into the sky and beams of sunshine were coming in through the windows.

“It’s a good day for commerce.” John thought.

He unlocked the doors to his mercantile shop and within 20 minutes, half the town was in there bustling and browsing around. John was so busy though that he could help everyone and even saw several folks leave. This didn’t sit well with John as he prides him self in helping people find what they need in his store.

Outside, Buford was still asleep by the entrance. John wasn’t sure why his watchdog didn’t wake up at opening time. but that’s not the problem. The problem was tracking down the people who left his store without buying.

“If there was only a way to track these people and show them the items of what they were looking for.” John said to himself.

Buford is a terrible watchdog, but at least he’s a world class tracking dog and was able to pick up the scent of the folks who came into the store and were browsing around. John followed Buford to Crazy Cletus’ cabin. He walked to the front door and knocked. A man in full body, red wool underwear opened the door. John was taken back by the tart scent that wafted out the door and the air rushed in. John, holding back tears from the putrid aroma, asked in a, trying not to choke, voice, “were you at my shop today?”

Cletus looked at John, then erupted in laughter….

“Yeah, I simply browsing for some soap to buy from you. but I couldn’t find any so I left…” Cletus said.

“I wish I could have tracked you down sooner to help you with that…..,” John said with a grin.

FAST FORWARD TO NOW!

These days tracking people’s browsing behavior is a little easier.

Today, we’re people who traverse the digital frontier and us marketers use several methods to wrangle and track people and their behaviors. Google uses cookies (code to track IPs of users) and Facebook uses the Pixel (code to track Facebook ID’s across all platforms) which is paramount if you’re running Facebook ads since you can’t measure the results without one.

If you haven’t been running Facebook ads yet you should at least install the pixel on your site especially if you’re running an e-commerce store. Why? Well first off lets talk about what a pixel does. It collects all the data from your website visitors (organic and non-organic). You’ll be able to see what pages or what products your visitors are landing on. From here, you can do all kinds of cool stuff like build a Website Custom Audience (WCA) of your visitors.

Now that you have an audience of people who’ve vistied you, you can then retarget those people who’ve been to certain pages or viewed certain products or even abandoned their cart with ads of what they were looking at. No need to send Buford out there tracking their scent.

As your audience grows then you can create Lookalike Audiences (LAL) based off past traffic and customers and the send out ads to those similar audiences who convert higher since they have similar purchasing behaviors as the seed audience you build the LAL from.

**Note – You need a seed audience of at least 100 – the more, the better as Facebook will have more data points to find similar users.**

The pixel is a pretty amazing piece of code.

Facebook Pixel Options

Here is a quick break down of how to optimize the data that you collect from the Facebook pixel and how you can use that data to improve your results.

Track Conversions

Depending on whether you count a con version as a lead ad email optin, traffic to a page, or a purchase, the Facebook pixel allows you to track all of these scenarios and gives you data on the cost to acquire that conversion. With more data coming in, you can make the necessary changes for improvement to increase those conversions. Good times!

Remarketing

This is one of the most powerful techniques used. The pixel tracking data allows you to show targeted ads to people who have already visited your site, looked at a product and even added it to their shopping cart. This is of course is you’re running e-commerce. For example, you can show people an ad for the exact product that they abandoned in a shopping cart or even added it to their wish list. This audience is hot and ready to buy. TAKE MY MONEY!!!

Create Lookalike Audiences

This technique was mentioned above, but to recap, the pixel data allows you to build a lookalike audience of people who have similar likes, interests, and demographics to people who are already interacting with your website. You can even create a LAL, Life-time Value Audience (LTV) where you can assign a monetary value of each of your customers in a .csv file, then upload that to Facebook and then Facebook creates and audience based on the values that you input of your customers. Let’s say that you have 150 people who buy a lot of products from you over time, then you would add those people and high number values to each person in the .csv file and then upload it. Facebook will then do some behind the scenes algorithm super snooping math and find you similar type people. This helps you increase your potential customer base with an extremely high quality audience. If that isn’t the bee’s knees, I don’t know what is. LOL!

Measuring Your Ads Effectively

Using a Facebook pixel to track and monitor the data of the ads that you’re sending out there is extremely important. If you don’t use it, then take your cash, put it in a metal bucket and light it on fire. You’ll bur through money if you have no data analyze to see what is and isn’t working. Simple as that.

So, to improve your ads effectiveness and quality, you can change the ad creative, copy, your optimizations, your audience, placement, and a myriad of other variables. With so many options to to get your ads seen by the people who are most likely to take your desired action, the sooner you get the Facebook pixel installed and collecting data, the sooner your business can benefit from this platforms superior marketing landscape.

Facebook Pixel Uses

Guess what? More pixel options to use for your specific business needs.

The Facebook pixel can track and collect data on two different kinds of events:

1. Standard Events

These are nine events that Facebook pre-defines for each action a person takes on your website or the ad itself. You can copy and paste the code into your website manually or use apps or plugins depending on your web property’s platform

Here are the Standard Event Codes that Facebook uses.

View content: Someone lands on a page on your website.

Search: Someone uses the search function to look for something on your site.

Add to cart: Someone adds a product to their shopping cart on your site.

Lead: Someone signs up for a trial or otherwise identifies themselves as a lead on your site.

Complete registration: Someone completes a registration form on your site, such as for a subscription product.

**Offline Events are not listed here. Offline events allow you to upload your interaction data from your point of sale (POS), call center or CRM systems. Facebook will then anonymize the data and match your events to users on Facebook.**

2. Custom Conversions

Custom conversion events are your own events or actions that you can use in place of standard events or to mine additional data and super detailed information of your site visitors.

To use custom conversions, you’ll need to use the URL and set the rules based on specific web addresses keywords in the URLS. Maybe the ‘ViewContent’ event is too generic for your Jewelry store. So you’d create a custom conversion event for say Men’s Jewelry and one for Women’s Jewelry. This way, you can segment the traffic and send appropriate ads to that audience later. It’s a powerful tool to be able to create your events.

You can use the additional parameters and customize the standard events to define your custom conversion event using URL rules below.

How much a conversion event is worth

Product name, category, or ID

The number of items someone adds to their shopping cart

A specific search string

The status of a registration

Give these custom conversions a try as you advance with your Facebook knowledge and know how to properly implement them into your marketing strategy.

SUMMARY REWIND!

As you can see, you’re now living in the future of marketing while poor John and Buford are stuck manually tracking down shoppers of the mercantile store; which as you can see is time intensive and can be a burden to your health if you have to visit people like Crazy Cletus.

We at HDG highly recommend to get a Facebook pixel installed and start running ads as soon as you can. With over 2 billion users on Facebook, your audience is on there and they’re looking for what you have to offer…..even soap.

If you have any questions on the Facebook pixel and how we can help, post in the comments and we’ll get back to you.